"I never realized you were so ambitious."

"It comes from marrying into money."

He grunted, and picked up his rifle to hook the sling over his shoulder. "Let's go on then and put it behind us."

"You are going armed to an evening party?"

"I'm going nowhere without Deerkiller, Boots. You'll have to put up with both of us barbarians at the table." One brow went up in a sharply defiant angle, and Elizabeth realized suddenly that Nathaniel truly dreaded what was before them.

Among the odds and ends on the dresser, she caught sight of the eagle feather which he normally wore in his hair. Elizabeth reached up on tiptoe and quickly knotted it into the simple black band that bound the long queue at the nape of his neck.

Nathaniel looked at himself in the mirror and rewarded her with a wolfish grin.

* * *

Elizabeth was relieved to find that the party of jurists and merchants she had anticipated was not to materialize. Instead she found herself in the company of a small group of French immigrants, aristocrats fleeing the fury of the mob that had taken over in France. Simon Desjardins and Pierre Pharoux were on their way to found a settlement on the western frontier. Her first impulse was to sit down with these Frenchmen and hear directly about the revolution in their homeland, but an introduction to Judge van der Poole's last guest put this out of her mind completely.

Mr. Samuel Hench was presented to her as a Baltimore printer on business in Albany. He had delivered a number of volumes to the judge, and been asked to stay to dinner. By the quality of his dress Elizabeth saw that he was very wealthy, and by its plainness, that he was Quaker. He was a large man, broad in the shoulder, with sharp features at odds with the mild expression of his blue eyes. Above a high forehead his hair was iron—gray.

"Mrs. Bonner," he murmured. "Mr. Bonner. Fate has brought us together this evening, for otherwise I would have come to look for thee. Or I should say, I would have been looking for a Miss Middleton, formerly of Oakmere."

Elizabeth could see the watchful tension in Nathaniel's face, and so she spoke for them both. "And why is that, Mr. Hench?"

"Because it would be remiss of me to be in this part of the world and not pay my respects to Caroline Middleton's daughter."

"You knew my mother?" Elizabeth smiled with relief.

He bowed briefly. "I knew her as Caroline Clarke, before her marriage to thy father. Her mother—your grandmother—was my aunt Mathilde, my mother's sister."

* * *

Nathaniel found himself between the Frenchmen. They had so many stories about their adventures to date, and so many questions about the western frontier that van der Poole's good food grew cold on his plate. Listening to the plans they laid out for him in detail, plans which were both daring and wildly under informed to the point of recklessness, Nathaniel grew both alarmed and annoyed. But they were sincere and they saw the things around them for what they were rather than for the price they might fetch. He would have liked them, under other circumstances, so Nathaniel fought the impulse to give them the whole truth in one lump and watch them choke on it. In another setting, with other company, he would have told them the worst of what they would face, from impassable rivers to the Seneca, who would not stand idly by and watch their hunting grounds divided up among yet more O'seronni.

Far down the table on its other side, Elizabeth was deep in conversation with Samuel Hench. She had that concentrated look about her, the one that came over her when she was reading, or listening to Hannah. Nathaniel took another forkful of bass and onion pie, trying at the same time to turn his attention to the story he was being told of the Frenchmen's cold reception in Philadelphia.

"Your secretary of state did not even offer us seats when we came to call on him. He was openly hostile to our plans to bring our families and colleagues here from France."

Mr. Bennett had been following the conversation without taking part, but now he put down his glass with a small thump.

"Pardon me, gentlemen, but I do find that hard to credit. Mr. Jefferson has spent a great deal of time in France, after all. If his patience is short right now with you or your countrymen, it will have to do with the fact that your Minister Genet has been outfitting privateers to attack the British Navy in our waters. But Mr. Jefferson's love of things French is legendary."

Pharoux was not going to back down. "I had great hopes of him for exactly that reason," he said, "You see, I am an architect and an engineer, monsieur. I hoped that he and I would have some common ground on which to build an understanding. But it seems we are not the right sort of Frenchmen. We are on the wrong side of the revolution, and do not deserve to keep our heads."

His voice had not risen, but his emotion caught Elizabeth's attention.

"I for one am glad that you have kept your heads," she said. "And I see no reason that you should not make a home here for yourselves. But I am an immigrant myself, of course. It is easy to be generous with that which one does not possess." She hesitated, and Nathaniel knew she was wondering who might now be living on those lands these men had so easily claimed for their own.

Desjardins raised a hand in a conciliatory gesture. "Madame, I beg you to excuse my colleague's temper. It has been a difficult process, trying to make our way in this country. Last week we rented a carriage from a livery not so very far from here, at the cost of one dollar per day—"

"That is a reasonable price," interjected van der Poole, his hands folded across his ample belly and his head resting comfortably on his goiter.